A Season in Mallorca

In the winter of 1838, George Sand took a boat to Mallorca with her two children and a dying Chopin, spent fifty-nine miserable nights in an abandoned monastery cell at Valldemossa, and went home and wrote a book announcing that the Mallorcans were thieves, savages and monkeys, and that the pigs were the only members of the household with any manners.It became the most famous book ever written about the island. It has never been forgiven.Alexander has read it ten times and never been to Mallorca. So he goes - overland from Bucharest by train and ferry, arriving in September 2024 and staying until the last day of April - with the critical French edition in one pocket and Robert Graves's devastatingly polite English translation in the other.He walks eleven hundred kilometres. He rides the wooden train through thirteen tunnels to Sóller and takes the tram to the sea. He spends fourteen hours at a village pig-killing, hears a terrified boy sing the end of the world with a sword in his hands on Christmas Eve, stands in the smoke and cowbells of the demons at Sant Antoni, climbs Massanella in snow, and walks the whole Serra de Tramuntana on the old mule tracks in eight days.He finds the dry-stone walls that built the mountain and the Arab water system still running by the minute after a thousand years. He finds the fifteen surnames that marked a family as unclean for two hundred and fifty years. He finds nine thousand French prisoners abandoned on a rock off the south coast, half of whom died there. He finds the seasonal workers sleeping in vans three kilometres from the four-star hotels they clean.And somewhere in a cold cell in December, reading her in the place she wrote about, he works out what he has been arguing with for twenty-five years - and discovers he has been aiming slightly to the left of the target.Sharp, funny, generous, and full of talk: a bookseller with a moustache like a piece of rope, a night nurse, a madona who tastes raw paprika by hand, and a woman of eighty-eight who settles the entire question in one sentence at eleven o'clock at night.